CSV to Google Sheet? | Voters

CSV to Google Sheet?

Dave Simons

Would it be possible for you to have the data available (that would normally be in the CSV) in a google sheet we could link to? We are linking to TBA but still manually pulling the CSV and updating. Thanks a ton! - 1619

March 13, 2023

Abhijit Gupta

So far I don't have any way to do this, but I am curious to hear how TBA does it. Do you use a community-built extension or something from TBA directly? And what is the workflow like?

Dave Simons

Abhijit Gupta: as far as I know, TBA just relies upon the FIRST API and then manipulates that data into tables. We're in the process of looking into getting data from the FIRST API directly vs. scraping via =IMPORTHTML() via google sheets.

Abhijit Gupta

Dave Simons: I guess I am mostly curious in how you manipulate the TBA data into tables. Do you have to manually export CSVs as well or do they provide a Google Sheets template/extension? Or do you scrape HTML using that function? If so from which URL specifically?

Dave Simons

Abhijit Gupta: I'm essentially scraping the HTML. While there is an API, it's easier for us to use =IMPORTHTML("url","table",key")... example for the Utah Regional to get the qual matches into a google sheet , one can use =IMPORTHTML("https://www.thebluealliance.com/event/2023utwv", "table", 1) in cell A1.

This is not nearly as predictable or efficient as using the API- but it also doesn't require keys or programming. Great for one-time uses.

Abhijit Gupta

Dave Simons: Thanks for the context. I'm not optimistic that I will have the bandwidth to look into this during the season, but hopefully you can use the CSV export for now. If anyone in the community integrates the API into something for Excel/Sheets, I'll let you know.

Dave Simons

Abhijit Gupta: All good! It's just a step for us to update, and tasking with a daily csv import is not a chore. Thanks for the hard work.